Jon's Place

Saturday, April 14, 2007

BrainBot

So, all this work I've been doing for the past few months is starting to show some results: BrainBot* is coming together. BrainBot is the Bioloid humanoid I am building for the Brain Engineering Lab. They plan to use it as an AI research tool for vision and object manipulation tasks.

The chest compartment is coming along, and I have the two wireless cameras mounted on their pan and tilt servos. We had a lot of problems getting wifi to work with the wifi module we had chosen, so we have decided to go with using one of the new gumstix boards onboard, which can do USB host. The gumstix provides us with the ability to use a USB interface chip to talk to the Bioloid bus directly, without needing a microcontroller. When they release the wifi module for it, we will be getting one of those as well - for now, we're going to use a USB wifi module. Thanks once again to some help from my brother (and the guys on the gumstix mailing list) I was able to get my USB wifi module working on the gumstix, and I've also got my PC talking to the Bioloid bus using the USB chip.

*The BrainBot project is directed and funded by the Brain Engineering Lab and Neukom Institute

2 Comments:

  • Pretty cool looking. I like the cameras. Now help me build one of these with Sun SPOTs and that would be the icing on the care for me :)

    Q: Is any of the processing of the video intended to be done on the robot ?

    By Blogger Eric Arseneau, At April 15, 2007 at 1:02 AM  

  • You'll be able to buy one as a kit from me, and substitute the gumstix for a Sun SPOT if you so desire...

    All video processing is done on the PC, using RoboRealm to start with, although I think the Brain Engineering guys have their own vision processing system.

    By Blogger Unknown, At April 15, 2007 at 7:43 AM  

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